A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.

No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you’re going to bump into somebody that makes you go, ‚Hmm, I don’t mind seeing this person every day.‘

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

Children make your life important.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

I married my best friend that happens to be a girl.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

We want our marriage to be a triumph, not a tragedy.

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Some people love so hard that they can’t control those emotions when they’re at their deepest point.

That is what fame is, isn’t it? To get the world to fall in love with you.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

I love being a dad. I just love it.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

The one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.